In late June, the Globe and Mail published a front-page feature article by former Mideast bureau chief Mark MacKinnon concerning the depressed situation of Palestinians and Gazans under Israeli rule. It was extremely one-sided. Israel was portrayed as the source of all woes. The article was accompanied by seven photos illuminating Palestinians’ poor health conditions, lack of city infrastructure and buildings destroyed by Israeli bombs.
Unmentioned: the Gazans’ wanton destruction of the magnificent, profitable greenhouse system built by Israeli settlers who were forcibly removed in 2005 in order to grant Gaza its quasi-independence; the millions in aid money squandered on attack tunnels and salaries to suicide bombers; the billions of dollars squirrelled away by former and present Hamas leaders, not to mention an estimated $100 million by West Bank dictator Mahmoud Abbas.
Unexplained: the use of scare quotes around “terrorists” to describe Hamas, officially designated a terrorist organization by our own and many other governments, including the EU. These observations and many more are included in a trenchant response to MacKinnon’s article by ever-vigilant Honest Reporting Canada.
MacKinnon’s research seems to have consisted mainly of interviewing a dozen sad Gazans, for the article did not contain a single statistic. But there are plenty of revealing statistics on Gaza and West Bank Palestinians available in Israeli writer-scholar Ben-Dror Yemini’s new book, Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Taken together, they portray a radically different picture of Gaza from the one MacKinnon would have us buy.
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See Also:
(1) Downtown church cancels event honouring terrorist
